Hi there,

Every owner I have ever spoken to has had this month. The diary is full. The team is stretched thin just keeping up with it. And the bank balance is not moving in the direction any of that would suggest it should.

The instinct is to treat this as a revenue problem, to think the answer is more patients or longer hours. I said something on a webinar back in July that I still believe is the actual heart of it (the original post is here) it is not a revenue problem, it is a visibility problem. The money is often being made. It is just leaking out somewhere nobody is watching closely enough to see.

There are three places this tends to happen quietly. Cost creep that nobody rechecks once a supplier contract is signed, so prices drift upward and nobody notices for months. Associate splits that slowly drift from what was actually agreed, through small adjustments nobody wrote down properly. Treatment that gets planned in the chair and never actually gets booked, so it simply evaporates from the diary.

None of these are dramatic on their own. That is exactly why they persist. Nothing about any of them ever triggers an alarm. A busy diary looks like success. A full waiting room looks like success. Neither of those things tells you whether the money behind them is actually landing where it should.

Speak soon,

Arun

This is also exactly the theme of the evening Smita and I are hosting on 14 October: Owner, Not Operator. If any part of what I have just described sounds familiar, that evening walks through where these leaks tend to sit and what a properly built structure does about them. Reserve a seat here.